


Wash Me Away

by Shegry



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Car Accidents, M/M, there's like. one mention of homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:38:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3226082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shegry/pseuds/Shegry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody knew about my fascination with the rain, and I bet that even if they did, they wouldn’t have asked me about it. When they’d make small talk about the weather, I’d respond with, “Oh, it’s pretty bad. I got soaked.” That seemed like the most logical thing to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wash Me Away

There was a time when I loved the rain, loved how it felt on my skin, cold and uneven. Somebody told me when I was young that lonely people found solace in rain because it gave them the feeling of a cold touch when there wasn’t a warm embrace waiting for them. When my parents told me to cover up, wear a jacket, stay dry, carry an umbrella, I did. When I was home alone, though, and I could hear the patter of rain drops on the windows and bouncing off the roof, I’d wander outside in my t-shirt and my shorts and pad with bare feet along the sidewalk with my arms outstretched, feeling the rain on my skin. I’d shiver at first, but after a while I’d tilt my head back and let it make my face wet and dampen my hair. When I’d come back to the house, I’d search frantically for a towel as the drafts chilled me, and I’d sit with a mug of coffee as I dried, leaving my skin feeling stiff.

In high school, there were classmates who would tell me that walking home in the rain without an umbrella would make me sick, but that made me all the more eager. They didn’t know I’d been doing that sort of thing for years, and I didn’t care to tell them. They didn’t need to know. When Daichi would offer to walk me halfway back and share his umbrella, I would accept and stay close, trying my best to stay dry without pushing him out from underneath, and then when we’d split, I’d run halfway down the block until I was sure he wasn’t looking before stopping and walking slowly home. My parents would ask why I didn’t try harder to stay dry, I’d apologize, and then I’d change into warm clothes.

Nobody knew about my fascination with the rain, and I bet that even if they did, they wouldn’t have asked me about it. When they’d make small talk about the weather, I’d respond with, “Oh, it’s pretty bad. I got soaked.” That seemed like the most logical thing to say. When I’d study, I would always have ambient rain tracks playing. They made it easier for me to focus and kept me calm amongst all of the stress of finals. When Daichi came over to study with me and it was playing off to the side somewhere, he never said anything about it, and I was glad that he didn’t. To be honest, I didn’t know why I enjoyed the rain so much, and probably wouldn’t have been able to tell anybody if they’d cared enough to ask.

In my third year of high school, I shared a class with Daichi. We both had good grades, and it wasn’t a surprise that we both planned on going to college after we graduated. What I was’t expecting was for him to tell me that he was going to attend the same university as me, one with a small campus and a decent volleyball team that we both ended up playing for. Though I wasn’t the star setter of Karasuno’s team, I was still good enough to play in college. Neither of us were regulars, but we were still glad we could play together during practice and at games every now and then.

It was on a spring afternoon, after we were both finished with our classes and had gone to a local cafe for sandwiches and coffee, that Daichi first asked me out. It was drizzling, and I’d been looking out the window out to the street, my mug radiating heat into my hands. Our conversation about upcoming practices and homework for other classes had grown silent while we both sat comfortably, drinking in the warm atmosphere and enjoying the light jazz music playing over the cafe’s speakers. I found myself drawn to the view outside, watching passersby trotting down the sidewalk wearing their jackets over their heads as cars zipped by in the opposite direction with windshield wipers moving like metronomes and their headlights cutting into the drops as they fell. The tiny rainbows that formed on the road as the lights shone over it only lasted for a fraction of a second before they were gone, along with the cars that had brought them. Daichi caught me staring and asked what I was looking at, turning to gaze out the window himself.

“It’s a nice day,” I said, and the boy across from me only huffed in amusement.

“I guess if you’re a plant,” Daichi responded, taking a sip from his coffee before placing the mug rather loudly back on the table, which got me to turn my head, and then he’d started, “Hey, Koushi…”

I ignored the bustle outside while he spoke; there was a sense of importance in his voice. “This is going to be the most cliché thing I ever say, just a heads up.” His bluntness made me laugh, enough for him to look as if he was embarrassed and laugh along with me. “Okay, we’ve been really good friends for a long time now, and I like you a lot, and I was wondering if you’d like to do something like this again sometime. You know, like, get coffee. Except it’d be a date and I’d pay. Would you be interested?”

Something about Daichi’s straightforward confession made me giddy, giddy enough to smile from ear to ear as my face heated up.

“I’d love to,” I’d responded, unable to wipe the joy from my face, and the two of us had laughed all the way back to the dorms, awkwardly bumping shoulders while trying to fit under his umbrella. As soon as we got back and he packed the clumsy thing away, I could finally take his hand. It was warm, his palm calloused from spiking and firm like the way I imagined it would be. In that moment, Daichi felt like my captain again and I didn’t look for the solace in the rain.

I didn’t expect for us to be such a showy couple, purposefully bumping each other on the way to classes, me tugging on his hand to get him to follow; I didn’t expect to be the kind of person who would do the two-straws thing when we got soda at an old diner or sneak cheek kisses when we thought nobody was looking. I didn’t even realize I was doing that until the waitress gave me an awkward look when she came back to the table with our orders. Daichi had to hit me to get me to stop laughing and hiding behind my hands, but it didn’t stop me from kissing him again not five minutes later.

There wasn’t a big moment when we told everybody that we were dating, it just happened when classmates saw us holding hands or throwing volleyballs at each other after practice. There was suspicion before that, that I’d heard, since we had been so close from high school and ended up at the same university, and I heard a few “I told you so”s from the other side of the gym when our teammates thought I wasn’t listening. Too bad they didn’t know I was also known for being a terrible eavesdropper. Daichi was worried about backlash, but the few people who minded were substantially outnumbered by those who didn’t, so I told him to just forget about it. That was easy when he remembered just how caught up he was in our young love.

After the beauty of spring faded and we were met with the harsh heat of summer, Daichi and I decided to keep things closer to the campus, except on special occasions. We’d sit in the dorms and play card games with the other students, push each other into the large fountain in the middle of the campus after class, and learned to walk on opposite sides of said fountain as we passed by it (completely disregarding that one time that Daichi was too busy staring at me through the water from the other side that he didn’t watch where he was going and walked right into it anyway).

The first time Daichi decided to take me on a more formal date, the two of us ended up planning it a week in advance. The presentation was nothing special: Daichi had asked if I wanted to go out for dinner when he called to send me a good morning message before he headed to his first class of the day. We were slowly getting into the swing of our schedules and got used to not being able to do anything together until after volleyball practice. If one of our dorms was empty, we’d crash there, but we tried to avoid any sort of PDA in front of awkward parties.

As the date we’d set drew closer, I kept an eye on the weather reports just for the sake of checking, but nobody said anything about the downpour that started as soon as we made it out of the dorms. Daichi and I both ended up running through the rain, laughing and cursing as we stumbled on the sidewalk down to the train station that brought us the rest of the way to where we were headed, a small restaurant on the edge of the city that placed tulips along the windowsills and offered outside canopy seating. We’d planned on sitting there up until we stepped outside and the weather decided to be unreasonable, but because of the rain it was also relatively empty inside.

The place was cozy and smelled faintly of cooked rice and that distinct scent that rain carries, probably tracked in by anybody else who had been rushing in to stay dry. Since it was a summer day, we hadn’t brought jackets and had to wait for the water to dry from our previously pressed shirts while we sat and told stories of the out-of-the-ordinary kinds of things that had happened that day. What had seeped in through our shoes was a lost cause.

Dinner was nice and we spent most of it doing what the two of us usually did - laugh, share food, bump each other “accidentally” - except we did it in nicer clothes with better food. I couldn’t tell you what I’d ordered there, though; my memories from that date are all of what happened afterwards.

We didn’t feel like running back out into the rain, but we didn’t bring any sort of cover. I didn’t want to get my shirt wet again since it had finally dried and I could get it to stop sticking awkwardly to me, but when we left the restaurant Daichi took my hand and pulled onto the sidewalk and up the street. There was no cover and we weren’t moving like we were in a hurry. Those who were doing a better job of staying dry gave us weird looks, but I didn’t mind them; I was focused solely on where we were going. The train station was in the other direction, and I didn’t want to be out in my soggy shoes any longer than I had to be.

Daichi must have come to the area before, because he knew there was a park at the end of the block, and that’s where he pulled me to. There wasn’t anybody else there and the only light was supplied by dim streetlights not far off. I was starting to get cold, so I stepped closer to him and held onto his arm as he stopped in the middle of the path. “What are we doing here?”

Daichi laughed, held out an arm to watch rain fall onto it, and I watched it too. The water glistened as it fell off of him and gathered in his hand slowly, making a tiny pool in his palm. “I was planning on taking you here anyway,” he said simply and turned his palm to let the water fall out of it. When he put his arms around me, I could feel the wet press of fabric on my back, but also the warmth of his arms on my waist, and it made me shiver. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so they ended up on his chest, pressed up between us, and I think my chilled body pressed to his made him shiver, too.

“Have you ever seen those movies, where the couples kiss in the rain?” Daichi seemed composed in a way I wasn’t; we were alone and I was nervous, but for what I couldn’t say. Feeling the press of his forehead against mine, I felt compelled to stay quiet. His question sat in the air, unanswered, but I could tell that’s how he meant for it to be. I felt awkward and warm when he kissed me, we were both soaked to the bone and the rain was cool on my skin, but Daichi was fire hot against my fingertips and along my lips. I could feel his heart in my chest, and it was nice to know his was beating in time with mine.

We probably would have looked pretty funny, had anyone been able to see us - a couple of college kids standing in the middle of the park while it rained - so I was glad that nobody was clueless enough to be out in that weather like we were. When we pulled away we laughed, felt the water drip down our faces and off of our chins while the distant sound of passing cars provided white noise. We stayed at the park and did silly couple things, like play around on the swings and spin anything we could find that would spin. Walking back to the train station, we watched as people ran by and laughed. We were long past caring about how wet we ended up.

We stood as close to each other and as far from other people as we could on the way back to town, trying to be at least somewhat considerate of everybody else, and we giggled like junior high students whenever we would almost topple over. I thought maybe for the first time in a while that I didn’t mind the cold touch of the rain on my skin, and yearned for the walk back to campus.

We took the long way back, along the outside of town where small business and houses line the streets and it’s quiet and calm. I was feeling lighter than air with nothing holding me back except for the occasional pull of Daichi’s hands. I was skipping down the street like I used to when I was younger, letting the rain run over me as Daichi laughed and followed close by. I had started to close my eyes and just go, watching the blocks turn into intersections ahead of me; no headlights, just street lights and house lamps making the path in front of me visible. I was just a bubbly student from a small town who didn’t have a care in the world, doing whatever I wanted in the glow of the evening.

I shouldn’t have been as reckless as I was.

When I heard a shout I stopped, but I was on the ground in the next instant and there was so much noise. The quiet patter of rain disappeared and I heard screeching tires and strained voices. Doors opened and blinds pulled back and I didn’t even get to open my eyes. All I could feel was the pain in my palms and on my knees and up my right cheek from where I’d collided with the road. When I could finally see, I found that my hands were bloody and there were holes in my pants; my face was also presumably covered in blood. I looked around frantically to see what had happened, and was met with headlights, a small group of people, and a lot of yelling. Somebody was on their phone off to the side of the street, shouting something about an ambulance. I didn’t see Daichi.

I tried to get up from the street, panicking as I rose to shaky legs, and another person with an umbrella ran over to me.

“Are you okay?” she nearly shouted at me, and I nodded and waved her off, stumbling over to the crowd of people. I knew. That had to be it. I was pushing people out of the way, yelling to get through, and then froze. The water dripping from my fingertips was stained red as it fell onto the asphalt beside Daichi. I couldn’t tell teardrops from raindrops, they were all the same rolling across my cheeks and stinging in the scrape on my face.

Somebody was telling me to go away, so I started yelling something that I don’t remember. Daichi looked terrible, scraped all over, and I put my fingers cautiously to his neck. The man was trying to pull me off again, so I pushed him off of me. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch my boyfriend!” I could barely see, but I felt a faint pulse and his breathing was unsteady.

I took his hand and I kneeled there and I cried, waiting for the ambulance that was apparently coming. The crowd of people backed away, but they were hovering close by, I was sure. I couldn’t hear anything but the needle-like pang of water on rooftops and my own distressed sounds, but then there was a whisper-soft voice in front of me. It called my name.

“Koushi…” The voice wavered, but I listened. “Are- are you okay?”

I felt like slapping him. I wanted to hit him for being more worried about me than he was about himself. His voice was wet like there was something caught in his throat and made his words sticky. “I’m fine,” I choked out, holding his hand close to myself. Maybe if I could have transferred some of my life energy to him, he’d end up okay. Of course he would.

I was going to say something else, but ambulance sirens made it hard to think, which meant getting the words through to anybody would have been impossible. I couldn’t do anything except follow them, follow what everybody was telling me to do, and on the way to the hospital I was completely silent. All I could hear was the yelling of the medics who were there with me and Daichi’s heartbeat ringing in my ears like it was connected to mine, but instead of the steady clockwork tick that it was supposed to sound like, instead of the comforting beat that I was supposed to feel flowing through my fingertips and into my blood, it was mechanic and sharp, and I hated it.

I sat in the silence of the waiting room for what felt like forever, still soaked through and scraped up myself, but nobody bothered me and I couldn’t bring myself to care about anything but the passing of nurses coming in and out of the doors that led farther back into the hospital. It was quiet for so long that when I started crying again when the nurse came back out, it hurt my ears. I felt like they were bursting, being beat on, I felt like my entire body was betraying me. I cried for an hour, stayed in the hospital for longer, ended up queasy in the bathroom a total of three times, and waited for a friend of ours from university to pick me up. My roommate wasn’t there that night.

I cursed the day I gave anybody my phone number, was reminded of what had happened every time it buzzed in my pocket. I knew what they were going to say before I looked at them, but a few of them struck something awful within me.

_> rip_

_> one less dumb homo_

_> it should have been you_

My parents called me to ask if I was coming to the funeral. Of course I said that I would. It ended up being the last time I saw Daichi, but not the last time I saw the Sawamuras. I didn’t cry, because I couldn’t. For his parents’ sakes, and for my own parents’ sakes, and for Daichi’s sake, I didn’t cry.

When I went back to volleyball practice, the coach kept asking why I would only toss to the wing spiker.

There was a time when I loved the rain, but that was a long time ago, when I was careless and young, and before I realized that it could do terrible things. I rush outside in a jacket and always carry an umbrella, because droplets feel like fire and ice on my skin, burning me and then chilling me to the bone as I pass through. But sometimes…

Sometimes I lower my umbrella and wait for the rain to wash me away.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be a drabble. oops
> 
> find me on tumblr and twitter maybe ?? idk (sunlithero on twit and autisticsurei on tumblr)


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